Insomniac City : New

York, Oliver, and Me

 By
Bill Hayes
Bloomsbury Publishing
USA
 Amazon's Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2017 List

A moving celebration of what Bill Hayes calls the evanescent, the

eavesdropped, the unexpected of life in New York City, and an
intimate glimpse of his relationship with the late Oliver Sacks.

A beautifully written once-in-a-lifetime book, about love, about life,

soul, and the wonderful loving genius Oliver Sacks, and New York,
and laughter and all of creation.--Anne Lamott Bill Hayes came to
New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest
idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having
spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the
death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound
consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire
State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves,
kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-
night strolls with his camera. And he unexpectedly fell in love
again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist
Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance--I don't so much fear death as I do
wasting life, he tells Hayes early on--is captured in funny and
touching vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks
at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first
time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of
cancer in August 2015).Insomniac City is both a meditation on grief
and a celebration of life. Filled with Hayes's distinctive street photos
of everyday New Yorkers, the book is a love song to the city and to
all who have felt the particular magic and solace it offers.

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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